UW-Madison says:Since September, many people have taken interest in a University of Wisconsin–Madison
study on the impact of early life stress on young rhesus monkeys. Thousands
have added their names to a petition on the website change.org, calling for an
end to the work, and we appreciate and share their concern for animals.

In fact, interest in and criticism of this project has been
on going since early in 2012, when the Madison-based animal rights group, the
Alliance for Animals, reviewed the minutes from one of the two animal care and
use committees that evaluated and eventually approved Ned Kalin's project and
began a campaign to stop it. Lori Gruen, Professor of Philosophy and Director
of Ethics in Society at Wesleyan
University criticized the
project on September 14, 2012, in a public speaking event sponsored by
UW-Madison at its much-hyped biomedical science cathedral, the Wisconsin
Institutes for Discovery. In May of 2013, the project was the topic of another
event on campus, "The Ethics of Animal Experimentation: A conversation
between bioethicist Rob Streiffer and research critic Rick Marolt." The large
room was crowded with interested people.

UW-Madison says that it shares with the nearly 350,000 people
who have signed the change.org position, "their concern for
animals."I doubt it.

UW-Madison says:But
we don’t appreciate the way petition’s author, Dr. Ruth Decker, misrepresents
the research. By piling up mistakes, myths and exaggerations, and omitting
important information, she asks well-meaning people to speak out with little
understanding of the real science and the long, deliberative process through
which it was approved.

Petulant and condescending. What they really don't like are
those 350,000 well-meaning people who have little understanding of the real
science. The Real Science. Mistakes, myths, exaggerations, and omissions? UW-Madison's mistakes, myths, exaggerations, and omissions of information
concerning its use of animals is legendary.

The long deliberative process UW-Madison refers to is a
discussion, usually perfunctory, among a group of people whose livelihoods
depend on the continuing flow of the tax dollars that pay for experiments on
animals. The committees are required to have a member who is not affiliated
with the institution. In practice, among the dozen people sitting around the
table, one or two of them will be non-affiliated members. All the others are
usually financially dependent on NIH grant monies.

But this project did get held up. Even some vivisectors
thought it was extreme. A very rare phenomena.

UW-Madison: The truth is of little concern to activists who
wish to end animal research, no matter the benefit to humans and animals. We
don’t share that sentiment. We prefer people make their judgments on animal
research with a fuller understanding of the research — of both its costs and
potential benefits.

I'm no psychologist, but this appears to be a projection of UW-Madison 's self-image onto those it thinks of as the enemy. The truth is
poison to UW-Madison . UW-Madison has destroyed large many records regarding their experiments on animals to keep them out
of the public eye. They apparently don't want the public to be able to become
informed. Even here, when UW-Madison says that they prefer people make
their judgments with a fuller understanding of the research, why didn't they
provide a link to the approved protocol? Why not encourage people to read it
themselves? Here's a link to the protocol; it is available to the public only
because UW-Madison's critics think the facts matter.

UW-Madison: This is not a repeat of experiments UW–Madison
psychology professor Harry Harlow conducted as many as five decades ago, some
of which subjected animals to extreme stress and isolation.

This is a half truth. Harlow
did conduct experiments similar to these, sans any claim of some possible new
drug emerging from it. He reported on the behavior of monkeys raised in nearly
identical ways: pulled from their mothers at birth, put alone into a cage until
able to self-regulate their body temperature, and then put with another infant
the same age. He published photographs of them clinging to each other.

UW-Madison: The methods for the modern work were selected
specifically because they can reliably create mild to moderate symptoms of
anxiety in the monkeys. They were chosen to minimize discomfort for the
animals, and to minimize the number of animals required to provide researchers
with answers to their questions.

And those questions are? They don't say, in spite of their
stated desire that people have a fuller understanding of the research. This is
the question: what patentable gene sequence might be a precursor to some part
of some neurochemical pathway associated with some form of mental illness? That
really is it. All their other claims are just window dressing.

As far as the reliable creation of mild to moderate anxiety,
that's not really what they are doing. No one seeing human children behaving as
Kalin expects the young monkeys will behave would describe them as being mild to
moderately anxious. In fact, the American Psychological Association says that
mild to moderate anxiety in humans can be helpful. They say that that's what we
feel "When you're driving in heavy traffic or struggling to meet a
deadline."

The idea that the feelings I have in heavy traffic are very
much like what infant monkeys raised first in solitary confinement and then
with a similarly traumatized male infant in a small cage, is ludicrous. The
American Psychological Association goes on to give examples of genuine anxiety
disorders and notes that: "Fortunately, there is effective treatment for anxiety disorders."
More evidence that the university isn't accurately describing Kalin's project.

UW-Madison: There is no “solitary confinement.” The animals
live in cages with other monkeys of their own age, a method of care called peer
rearing. This method is often used when mothers reject their infant monkeys,
which happens regularly in situations from nature to zoos to clinical nurseries
with first-time mothers or following caesarean-section births.

Complete gibberish. The baby monkeys are confined alone for
the first 4 to 6 weeks of their lives. In normal circumstances they would be
clinging to their mothers, being fondled, inspected, and cleaned by them, in constant contact. Infant monkeys and infant humans have very different
psychosocial needs when they are very young. Infant humans benefit from regular
touch whereas infant rhesus monkeys have a profound need for contact. It is
easy to understand this difference when considered from an evolutionary
perspective. Humans, like cats and dogs, are atricial; we are born at an
earlier developmental stage than many other animals and are nearly helpless and
not very aware of our surroundings. Rhesus monkeys on the other hand must cling
to their mothers very soon in order to survive. They are more developed,
physically and cognitively at birth than are humans. The trauma to them from
being taken from their mothers has no counterpart in humans.

After 4 to 6 weeks they are caged with another infant of the
same age and similarly maternally deprived. The university says, "The
animals live in cages with other monkeys." No they don't. Two
babies are in a cage. No infant is caged with "other monkeys."

UW-Madison says that peer rearing "happens
regularly in situations from nature to zoos...." That's ridiculous. Two motherless
infants can't raise each other. Nothing like this ever occurs in nature. UW-Madison must think the people reading their nonsense will believe anything.
And zoos go to great lengths when monkeys are orphaned in an effort to ameliorate the well
known impacts of being orphaned. In the Kalin project, the vivisectors
intentionally don't employ the techniques that are known to lesson the negative
impacts of peer rearing.

The serious consequences of peer rearing are known widely by
those who raise monkeys in the laboratory setting. "Nursery rearing is the
single most important risk factor in the development of severe forms of
abnormal behavior, such as self-biting, in rhesus macaques. This practice is
common in research laboratories and typically involves continuous pair housing
of infants without maternal contact." The effects of four nursery rearing
strategies on infant behavioral development in rhesus macaques (Macaca
mulatta). Rommeck I1, Gottlieb DH, Strand
SC, McCowan B. J Am Assoc Lab
Anim Sci. 2009 Jul.

UW-Madison: The animals in the study are not “terrorized,”
and do not experience “relentless torture.”

They may as well have claimed that dancing fairies come at
midnight and entertain them. I suspect that every time one of the infants is
pulled away from what or whomever they are clinging that the emotion they
experience is very much terror. In fact, when not trying to score PR points, UW-Madison agrees that the baby monkeys are terrorized. In 1998, UW-Madison wrote about Ned Kalin's experiments and said, "Being separated from mother terrifies infant primates."

As far as relentless torture, torture seems to
be a plastic concept in the hands of government. Can torture be psychological?
It seems to me that social and environmental deprivation could be torturous. If
so, then it seems that from the babies perspective, they could be experiencing
relentless torture. And certainly, the repeated separations will be torturous
experiences. And the procedures they will be subjected to are intended to add
to their distress.

UW-Madison: Most of their time is spent as a house pet would
spend its days — grooming, sleeping, eating and playing with toys, puzzles and
other animals.

Who keeps their house pet in a small cage 24 hours a day, every day? I'm
sure they do pick at themselves, but at their age, their mothers would be
grooming them. And they do eat and sleep. But the claim that they play with
toys, puzzles, and other animals is very misleading. In the wild, monkeys don't
seem to have toys or play with things as if they are toys, so calling some object
put into their cage a toy, is misleading. The monkeys are not sitting around
solving puzzles either.

Monkeys kept in standard laboratory cages are prone to
developing a number of aberrant behaviors, which for some monkeys can include
self-inflicted trauma. It was discovered that these often deleterious behaviors
can be moderated or reduced if the monkey's attention can be kept engaged.
Puzzle feeders are now a common item in the monkey labs. Their kibble is put
into a device that makes it difficult to get to. A monkey must work to retrieve
a piece. That's nothing like someone playing with a puzzle.

This is the second time in their response that they say the
monkeys are with, and now get to play with, other animals.

This is like you being kelp in a prison 24/7 with a cell mate,
and me telling someone concerned for your well being that you get to be with
people.

UW-Madison: On occasion, to assess the monkeys’ level of
anxious temperament, they are observed under two anxiety-provoking conditions.
The first involves the presence of an unknown person who briefly enters the
room, but does not make eye contact with the monkey. The second involves the
monkey being able to see a snake, which is enclosed in a covered Plexiglas
container in the same room, but outside the monkey’s cage.

This makes it sound like the monkeys will have only two
anxiety producing experiences. But of course, they will really have many more.

Let's count them. We can see a sort of timeline in a chart showing the planned procedures early
in this video. The chart predicts that all the manipulations, imaging, and
tissue collection will be complete before each monkey's 60th week of age. They
will be killed at some unspecified time, but according to the chart, they will
no more than 80 weeks old. During that 60 week period, beginning the moment
they are pulled from their mothers, each monkey will undergo: 7 human intruder
tests; 5 MRIs; 9 blood draws; 5 PET scans; 1 skin biopsy; 2 spinal taps; 1
exposure to a snake; be exposed to an unknown monkey 2 times; and be observed
in a "play cage" 2 times. When they are about 25 weeks old, they will
be taken from their cage mate, and placed with a new monkey (who has undergone
the same procedures).

Some of those events happen on the same day. The human
intruder, blood draw, and PET scan all occur in immediate succession on the
same day. Overall, the monkeys will be manipulated in some way every week.
Their separation from their original cage mate must be a particularly stressful
experience. Many of the procedures will entail being taken from their cage mate.
These repeated separations are likely to exacerbate the separation anxiety the
monkeys may experience. Together, this host of experiences seems much different
from UW-Madison's glossed over description of what will happen to the babies in their response to Dr. Decker's petition.

UW-Madison:The
stress the monkeys experience is comparable to what an anxious human might feel
when encountering a stranger or a snake or a nurse with a needle.

That's more meaningless gibberish. How does an anxious person
behave and feel? There are people who are so anxious that they can't leave
their home. They might faint if confronted by a stranger. I took an on-line
anxiety test at Psychology Today. It said I have "Existential
Anxiety." I like snakes. Strangers? For me it depends on the context. All
anxious people have the same reactions to a stranger, a snake, and a nurse with
a needle? What silliness. Hardly scientific.

UW-Madison: No one was “left out” of the review by
UW–Madison oversight committees. Several university committees spent a great
deal of time assessing Dr. Kalin’s anxiety research, and each committee found
it to be acceptable and ethical.

Context matters here too. Those committees approve
essentially every project they consider. It isn't a surprise that they approved
this one. What is surprising, what is a complete and novel departure from
business as usual, is the fact that someone embedded in the system said no. They
gummed up the works and stalled the project; its eventual approval was probably
never in doubt. Essentially every project gets approved, and Ned Kalin is a
powerful senior administrator and researcher.

And, the committees didn't decide that the experiments are
ethical. There is noting in the very limited committee minutes suggesting that
any ethical analysis took place, but that is as expected. There are no
committees at UW-Madison or at most other labs in the US that make
ethical decisions about the use of animals. The IACUC Handbook (2nd Edition.
CRC. 2007) notes that the committees are not able to make ethical evaluations. The
committees decide only if the planned use of animals complies withfederal regulations. If it does not, the
committee explains to the researcher what must be changed to gain approval, and
at times even provides prewritten responses for use on the forms.

UW-Madison: These were groups of researchers, veterinarians
and public representatives tasked with considering animal research on ethical
grounds, and with ensuring potentially beneficial research will subject the
fewest animals to the least invasive measures.

If true, the university has invented a new kind of
committee. But their ersatz balm doesn't ring true to me. I have reviewed the minutes of many
years of three of UW-Madison's animal use committees, two of which are the ones
that approved Kalin's new project. I have seen little if any evidence that the
committees ever engage in discussion about the ethics of a particular project
or the enterprise at large. But again, that isn't surprising because the
committees are not charged with making ethical determinations by either NIH or
USDA, the two main federal agencies involved in the oversight of animal
experimentation.

"[P]otentially beneficial" is justification for
just about anything. Every lottery ticket is a potential winner.

UW-Madison: As the petition notes, an animal rights group
took allegations about the committee process to the U.S. Department of
Agriculture. What the petition does not mention is that USDA conducted an investigation in August in
response to that complaint. Inspectors found the complaint lacking merit, and
the process to be entirely within compliance with federal regulations.

Maybe that's what the inspectors found, but it isn't what
they said. This is the body of the report:

No non-compliant items identified during this inspection.

This was a focused inspection conducted on 8/25/14 and
8/26/14.

Exit interview conducted on 8/27/14 with facility
representatives.

Regular observers of reports from USDA inspectors know that
a different inspector might have found differently. In any case, the report
says only that whatever the committee did was in compliance with animal welfare
regulations. We don't really know what was said during the committee meetings because UW-Madison has taken steps to keep the public from learning the plain facts. And they are being sued because of it.

What led to some observers imaging that there may have been
a violation of some sort may have been the result of something called designated review. When a committee explains to a researcher what they need to do to make
their project acceptable, it frequently defers further review by the entire
committee and leaves the final approval a designated committee member.
For members who were opposed to the project, consignment to designated review
could have made them feel locked out of any opportunity to further their
argument.

By "We" UW-Madison means those whose
income rely on the continuous turn of the federal tax dollar treadmill of
animal experimentation. As far as many others thinking his work should be
funded, most of them are also financially dependent on the treadmill's
perpetual motion. The appeal to our sympathy for patients would be less
manipulative if it mentioned the number of patients he sees in a day. I suspect
it is less than one. His role as a university administrator and as a lead scientist
on four tax-payer-funded projects must use up at least some of his time:

You'll notice too that UW-Madison refers to a statement from Tom
Insel, M.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) as
evidence of others thinking the experiments have merit:

“One only has to look at the Ebola crisis to appreciate the
vital role that animals play in biomedical research, in this case, in the
testing of potentially life-saving vaccines. But, it doesn’t stop there.
Neuropsychiatric disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S.
Advances in understanding and treating these devastating conditions rests on fundamental
basic behavioral and brain science that, as with infectious diseases, begins
with carefully conducted studies in animals. NIMH has supported the research in
the Kalin lab for many years. This support is part of our commitment to the
belief that careful, well-founded, peer-reviewed research such as this will
lead to improvements in our understanding and treatment of mental disorders.”

Well, when I look at the Ebola crisis, I see something else.
In any case, the support for Kalin boils down to this: "NIMH has supported
the research in the Kalin lab for many years." That's true, and they
should be ashamed of it. But shame isn't in the palette of emotions of most
vivisectors and Tom Insel is no exception.

60 Minutes ran a piece on the Yerkes Primate
Research Center,
maybe 15 years ago. They showed sedated monkeys being thrown into the back of
an open-bed truck as if they were sacks of potatoes. They also interviewed Tom
Insel, who was at the time the director of the primate center. They asked him
about monkey escapes from the primate center, and he said there hadn't been
any. Then they interviewed a young girl, she was maybe five years old. She told
about the monkey that had come onto the deck in their back yard. Insel had been
caught in a blatant lie. Insel's opinion on animal research hardly matters
since without it, he'd be out of a job. A small bit of trivia: Insel's own
research was focused on the function of oxytocin in stressed mice and voles.

UW-Madison: The decision to study animal models to understand
human psychiatric disorders is not made lightly.

Given the obscene amounts of money involved, they indeed
take the matter very seriously.

UW-Madison concludes with this: In this case, the human
suffering is so great that Kalin, the National Institutes of Health and
UW–Madison’s review committees believe the potential benefit of the knowledge
gained from this research justifies the use of an animal model.

But the people at NIH who approved the project are
vivisectors too. They are financially vested in the continuation of the
practice as is just about everyone at UW-Madison who has supported it.

The potential benefit should be considered by weighing the
proven benefits of Kalin's past research. But that metric isn't used by NIH or
UW-Madison because there haven't been any benefits from Kalin's past research,
and such a weighing would make it plain that the likelihood of benefit from his
new project is nil.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Most government-funded vivisectors are probably fairly smart
and have been to college. Those and other characteristics of that group further
inform modern thinkers about potential and observable effects of various
situational influences on behavior.

History and past research provide an immense body of
evidence demonstrating that otherwise normal people otherwise destined to live
more or less benign lives, can be easily induced to do bad things to other
people. Stanley Milgram showed us that a random person off the street will almost
always hurt, sometimes kill, a total stranger simply because someone who they
perceived as an authority told them to. Our moral rudders are apparently very
flimsy.

If a random person off the street can be so easily made to
do the worse things to someone they don't know, we don't need to wonder why or
how someone trained to do bad things can do them. But the behavior of
vivisectors provides us with something that is not as easily discerned in past
research into the causes of cruelty.

Past studies have had to rely on reports from people who
committed atrocities after they were widely condemned and stopped. Those people
have tended to speak somewhat guardedly. See for instance the interviews of
people who were interrogators or members of state-sanctioned death squads in Violence
Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities by M.
Huggins, M. Haritos-Fatouros, and P.
Zimbardo. (2002).

There are a handful of reports that have sought some
understanding of vivisectors' self perceptions and feelings about the things
they do. See for instanceThe Sacrifice:
How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People by LIA Birke, A. Arluke,
and M. Michael. (2007). There are also some books and articles written for the
public by vivisectors trying to justify their work, see for instance, Why
Animal Experimentation Matters: The Use of Animals in Medical Research, a
collection of essays edited by EF Paul and J Paul (2001). And there is a
collection of books written by vivisectors vilifying their critics. See for
instance The Animal Research War by PM Conn and JV Parker. (2008).

Today, there are on-line sources that provide some of
insight into the twists and turns of the vivisection industry's
self-justifications. Some of these are produced by lobbying groups and trade
organizations trying to promote the use of animals. These are groups like the
National Association for Biomedical Research and the Society for Neuroscience.
Many universities put up web pages to defend and promote their use of animals
as well.

A relatively new source of insight into the beliefs of
vivisectors is the on-line presence of some collections of writing by them. One
recent example is a defense of experiments on baby monkeys written by University of Wisconsin,
Madison
vivisector Allyson J. Bennett: "Child health benefits from studies of infant
monkeys – Part 1". Bennett's apology is her rebuttal to recent criticism of the use of
infant monkeys at UW-Madison and at the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development, a part of the NIH.

It isn't a coincidence that Bennett defends the use of baby
monkeys. Bennett and Steven Suomi are frequent collaborators. Stephen Suomi was
Harry Harlow's star pupil and deeply involved in imprinting an infamously dark
stain on the university's legacy. Suomi is the director of the NIH in-house lab
being criticized as a result of records being brought to light by PETA, particularly
video recordings of baby monkeys being used in macabre, psychological pulling-the-wings-off-butterflies
sorts of experiments, and the vivisectors' shocking (to some!) laughing response
to young monkeys' distress.

Bennett'sdefense of
the use of baby monkeys may be motivated as well by the national criticism that
has erupted over the resurrection of maternal deprivation at UW-Madison where
Bennett is now currently employed and being paid by taxpayers to study the long
term effects on monkeys raised in social isolation.

Bennett defends the use of baby monkeys generally by
pointing to their use: because vivisectors use baby monkeys, it must be proper
to use them. She provides a list of examples that she believesjustify frightening, physically and psychologically
harming, and killing young monkeys; or in her words, "demonstrate how the
work contributes to public health," as if, even if true, that could
justify the infants' terror, pain, and deaths.

She provides 29 bulleted examples. She was a busy badger.

The majority of them don't amount to anything at all. At
all. She simply points to projects that involve hurting and killing young
monkeys, more or less saying, wouldn't it be great if this project helps
someone someday? Her assertion is illustrative. Her point is exactly the one
used to justify every taxpayer-funded project using animals in the U.S. today.
Maybe she can be excused for succumbing to her industry's rhetoric.

Bennett points to only five examples that she
believes are evidence that experiments using young monkeys have benefited human
patients, and therefore are justified and justify all future use of infant
monkeys.

1. "Work conducted by Martha Neuringer at the Oregon
National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) on visual development established the
importance for infant nutrition of two nutrients, taurine and omega-3 fatty
acids, and led to the addition of these substances to infant formulas
worldwide. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8915371,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19369246)."

Martha Neuringer. I heard a description of her work at a law
conference in 1996; it contributed to who I am today. Really briefly, she took
infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers and raised them on a formula without
taurine, did serial brain biopsies on them, and reported that the absence of
taurine affected brain development in infant rhesus monkeys. And then she
repeated the experiment. And then she did it again -- she had to do something
to justify her draws on her taxpayer-funded grant.

Taurine is the most abundant
free amino acid in breast milk. Think infants might need it? Neurenger's work
is not much different than a demonstration that oxygen is a necessary component
of the air children breathe.Neurenger's
work was and continues to be cruel garbage. Even now, she is reporting that
monkeys fed nutrient deficient diets suffer long term health consequences.
Dietary omega-3 fatty acids modulate large-scale systems organization in the
rhesus macaque brain. Grayson DS, Kroenke CD, Neuringer M, Fair DA. J Neurosci.
2014.

2. "Scientists at the CNPRC developed the SIV/rhesus
macaque pediatric model of disease, to better understand the pathogenesis of
SIV/HIV in neonates and test strategies for immunoprophylaxis and antiviral
therapy to prevent infection or slow disease progression. Drug therapies used
to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to infant were developed in
nonhuman primate models at the CNPRC, and are now being successfully used in
many human populations to protect millions of infants from contracting HIV.
(http://www.cnprc.ucdavis.edu/koen-van-rompay/)"

Koen van Rompay's university webpage says that: "Dr.
Van Rompay was on the forefront of developing HIV treatments at the CNPRC in
the 1990s. He helped to develop and test the anti-viral drug tenofovir."

But not so much. SIV, the simian immunodeficiency virus was
not identified until after HIV the human immunodeficiency virus was described. When
scientists studying HIV in vitro discovered an agent that might have value in treating AIDS, monkeys researchers were quick to try it out on monkeys
intentionally infected with some version of SIV, a different disease in a
different species. Research using monkeys has never resulted in advancements in
treating HIV. At best, primate vivisectors have demonstrated that some methods
of preventing HIV in humans can sometimes be effective in preventing SIV in
monkeys. Big whoop.

3. "Eliot Spindel at the ONPRC has shown that large
doses of Vitamin C can protect developing lungs from the damage caused when
mothers smoke. This work has been duplicated in clinical trials.
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15709053)"

I'm no pediatrician, but I'll wager that increased nicotine
concentration in the amniotic fluid isn't good for a developing baby of any
species.

4. "WNPRC scientists and surgeons at UW Hospital
successfully tested a new compound, mycophenolate mofetil, in combination with
other drugs in monkeys and other animals, and then in human patients in the
1990s. Their work has saved the lives of patients needing kidney or other organ
transplants. These new therapies have also kept patients with chronic kidney
diseases, including lupus nephritis, which strikes many children and teens,
from needing transplants. (Hans Sollinger, Folkert Belzer, Stuart Knechtle,
others.) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8680054,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9706169,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8821838"

Maybe it was getting late when Bennett was writing this and
she simply forgot her theme: the benefits to children from experimenting on baby
monkeys, because she didn't provide any evidence to support her assertion;
there probably isn't any

It is an easily demonstrated fact that mycophenolate mofetil
was tested on animals, I don't know of any drugs that haven't been. Mycophenolate
mofetil was tested in rats, mice, and dogs before it was tried on humans, and I
don't think they were pups or puppies.

Here's a passage from a paper reporting on the first clinical
trial:

RS-61443 synthesized by Dr. Peter Nelson(Syntex Corporation,
Palo Alto, CA)was found to have improved
bioavailability as compared with mycophenolic acid. In vivo, the drug blocks
proliferative responses of T and B lymphocytes' and inhibits antibody formation
and the generation of cytotoxic T-cells. In vivo, monotherapy with RS-61443 was
shown to prolong the survival of heart allografts in rats and islet allograft
survival in mice. When combined with low doses of cyclosporine A (5mg/kg)and
prednisone (0.1 mg/kg), RS-61443 significantly prolonged the survival of renal
allografts in mongrel dogs. The first clinical trials with RS-61443 were
conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
The purpose of this study was to test the safety and tolerance in patients
receiving primary cadaver kidneys. RS-61443 (mycophenolate mofetil). A
multicenter study for refractory kidney transplant rejection. Sollinger HW,
Belzer FO, Deierhoi MH, Diethelm AG, Gonwa TA, Kauffman RS, Klintmalm GB,
McDiarmid SV, Roberts J, Rosenthal JT, et al. Ann Surg. 1992.

(An aside) "Recent findings from nonhuman primates
studied by Ned Kalin at the WNPRC suggest that an overactive core circuit in
the brain, and its interaction with other specialized circuits, accounts for
the variability in symptoms shown by patients with severe anxiety. The ability
to identify brain mechanisms underlying the risk during childhood for
developing anxiety and depression is critical for establishing novel early-life
interventions aimed at preventing the chronic and debilitating outcomes
associated with these common illnesses. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23538303,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23071305)"

I just had to include this here. Notice that she cites
nothing from Kalin's decades of experiments on young monkeysthat have benefited children. Nothing. It's
just the same old song and dance; his work has suggested this or that, but has
led to nothing. Nothing. Literally millions of taxpayer dollars and immense
suffering. He's hurting and killing baby monkeys, so it must be good, it must
be important. This is a stellar example of the mindset of someone doing and
trying to defend evil behavior. The simple facts are ignored; excuses are made;
nothing but hubris. And it's easy to understand why someone becomes such a cork
head, the research into this sort of blind evil behavior has been consistent.
Most of us would succumb; people are weak and almost always go along when an
authority figure -- a king, general, God, NIH, a man in a white coat -- tells
them to do something, no matter how odious. And, the propensity to act so badly
is reinforced when the authority figure awards you for your work and holds you
up as an example of the good. Most of us will do anything and believe anything we are
told to believe. The research on this is unequivocal. Unequivocal.

And since I have for a moment stepped aside from looking at
Bennett's claims actual benefit, I deviate a bit further and call your
attention to an implication of her apparent inability to locate an example of
actual benefit to children or adults from Kalin's experiments.

A few years ago, Kalin's regular collaborator and co-author
Richard Davidson was speaking at a local book store. Most of the audience was
there to adore him and moon over his close association with the Dalai Lama
(there's an example of screwing with a child's early development). But I and a
few friends had other questions in mind.

Put on the spot to point to one single benefit to human
patients that have resulted from his and Kalin's decades of cruelty, the only
thing he could come up with was to say that there was a Phase I clinical trial
underway to test something -- he wouldn't say what -- that had come out of the
experiments. If he wasn't lying, and there is absolutely no reason to think he
wasn't -- then whatever it was must have been an abject failure.

5. "The first pluripotent stem cell derived clinical
trials to treat childhood blindness are now underway, using stem cell
technologies discovered using monkeys first, then humans, by WNPRC scientist
James Thomson in the 1990s-2000s.
(https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=juvenile+macular+degeneration+stem+cell&Search=Search,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18029452, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9804556,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7544005

As far as Thompson's work on the isolation and culture of
pluripotent stem cells is concerned, he certainly didn't need monkeys, he could
have used any muticellular organism at its very early stages of development. He
used monkey blastocysts because they were readily available. He reported his
isolation of an embryonic cell line in monkeys in 1995 and then moved to the
use of human cells almost immediately. The notion that the first pluripotent
stem cell derived clinical trials to treat childhood blindness are now underway
because of Thomson's very few monkey cell experiments is farfetched and simply
ignores his publication history. And, unless you want to call a blastocyst a
baby, this too is far off the mark Bennett claims to be addressing.

And that's it. That's part and parcel of the
"benefits" Bennett has been able to identify as a result of
experiments on infant monkeys.

So, looking at Bennett's efforts to defend the use of baby
monkeys in harmful experimentation we gain further evidence and insight into the
effects of situational influences on behavior. It may have been Peter Singer who
pointed out the conditioned ethical blindness of vivisectors.
It can work like this: A student is confronted with a science lesson in school
that involves hurting and killing and animal or even dissecting an already dead
animals. When they voice their concern, the teacher, the authority figure, consoles
and encourages them, saying something along the lines of, "No one likes to
hurt animals, but sometimes in science there is no other choice."

Most of us in that situation, as research readily demonstrates,
will be swayed by the weight of the authority's opinion. Students who find biology
interesting and choose to follow a course that leads to a life science
education in college will have many reinforcing experiences, and at every turn,
if they voice some reticence, they will be consoled or challenged by the
current authority with the admonition that science sometimes requires
scientists to make tough decisions.

By the time they get to graduate school and land a job in
some scientist's lab, they have been thoroughly indoctrinated and are
surrounded by others who have been through similar conditioning. They see
around them scientists being honored by their institutions, media, authoritative
profession organizations, and receiving lavish monetary rewards for their
experiments on animals. It becomes ever more unlikely that they will be able to
think independently. Additional factors come into play as well. Because
medical research is often cast as a war against this or that malady, ethical
constraints are further weakened because we think war can necessitate actions
that would be unthinkable in times of peace. Additionally, vivisectors rightly feel
that they are under attack from people like me. Having a common enemy lends
itself to being less than critical about the things their fellow-victimized
colleagues are doing, and so little to no self-criticism or questioning of the ethical
premise is tolerated. I have an acquaintance who was drummed out of a primate
lab because she stopped and spoke with people protesting outside the lab and
then asked her laboratory colleagues what they thought about the protestors'
concerns. A current example of the matter-of-fact acceptance of their peers' opinions on the ethics and value of animal experimentation is UW-Madison's promotion of Bennett's essay (near the bottom of the right hand column.)

Because of the conditioning and the situational influences
on their behavior, vivisectors' ethical positions and confused arguments to
support their positions and beliefs are understandable and largely predictable.
I believe that they, as a group, offer those who have an interest in the roots of
evil behavior, a living laboratory which could further our understanding of a
phenomena that has most often had to be examined retrospectively.

Friday, October 17, 2014

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 181.6 million underweight pre-school aged children among the world’s developing nations. WHO estimates there are 210.5 million stunted pre-school aged children and 46.1 million wasted pre-school aged children living in the world’s developing nations.

The World Health Organization summarizes its concerns, “Our findings confirm the great magnitude of undernutrition which, more than any other disability, continues to hamper the physical growth and mental development of more than a third of the world's children. Indeed, it is a major threat to their very survival.” [emphasis added]

The National Center for Children in Poverty at the Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University reports that,
* The number of American young children living in poverty increased from 3.5 million in 1979 to 5.2 million in 1997. The young child poverty rate grew by 20 percent during that same period.

* 22 percent of young children in America live in poverty, i.e., in families with incomes below the federal poverty line ($12,802 for a family of three in 1997).

* Researchers have gathered new evidence on the importance of the first years of life for children's emotional and intellectual development. (Shore, 1997) Unfortunately, millions of American children are poor during these crucial years. Almost one in four (24 percent) of America's children under age three lived in poverty in 1995. These 2.8 million poor children face a greater risk of impaired brain development due to their exposure to a number of risk factors associated with poverty.

* Children deprived of proper nutrition during the brain's most formative years score much lower on tests of vocabulary, reading comprehension, arithmetic, and general knowledge. The more severe the poverty a child faces, the lower his or her nutritional level is likely to be.

* Exposure to neurotoxins such as lead causes brain damage and stunts the growth of the brain. 55 percent of African American children living in poverty have toxic levels of lead in their blood.

* Experiences of trauma or abuse during the first years of life result in extreme anxiety, depression, and/or the inability to form healthy attachments to others. Another troubling effect of early trauma is that it leads to a significantly higher propensity for violence later in life. The stressors that face poor families cause much more trauma for their children.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Reduce the Poverty Rate, says the National Center for Children in Poverty.

World Vision is the largest child sponsorship organization in the world according to their current television campaign to raise money for children in poverty. Spokespersons Kathy Lee Gifford and Alex Trebek tell viewers that $22 a month in donations will give one child living in poverty the food they need to have a chance for healthy development.

The Christian Children’s Fund asks for only $0.80 per day, or $24 a month to lift a child from hunger.

Feed the Children, an organization dedicated to feeding the most impoverished children in America, says they can move 1000 pounds of food for a donation of only $10 a month.

Look at these figures from another perspective. David Amaral, a researcher at the California Regional Primate Research Center in Davis, California and Ned Kalin, a researcher at the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center in Madison, Wisconsin received a combined total of $579,487 tax dollars in 1998. They were paid to inject chemicals into the brains of young monkeys. These chemicals were injected into the region of the brain associated with basic emotions such as fear.

This means that approximately 724,359 children were left in poverty last year so that Amaral and Kalin could study methods of disrupting normal emotional development in monkeys.

In 1997 the National Institutes of Health spent $114,502,974 to keep researchers at the seven Regional Primate Research Centers working at projects like Kalin's and Amaral's. Researchers worked to clone monkeys, addict them to cocaine, poison them with alcohol, infect them with monkey viruses, and study why so many monkeys in laboratories mutilate themselves. This $114 million was only a portion of the total spent by the federal government to experiment on primates. Most major universities have projects using primates underway. It would not be unreasonable to estimate that the total figure used in this line of research is today approaching $200 million dollars.

But, using the 1997 figures and using only the total consumed by the seven NIH centers that year, about 143 million children who could have been saved were left in poverty. So, these scientists could achieve no larger impact than demanding that the primate centers be closed immediately and the money allocated to them be immediately targeted to end the ravishes of child poverty. By simply closing the primate centers stunting and wasting could be nearly eliminated among the world's children.

And, by closing only one primate center, child poverty in the U.S. could be ended.

Call to Action: UW-Madison head vivisector says caring people should not let Ned Kalin's experiments continue.

At about 54:21 in the video, a UW-Madison faculty member asks university spokesperson Eric Sandgren, and I'm paraphrasing: "If the baby monkeys in Ned Kalin's project are being used because their emotions are so much like a human child's how is it ethical to use them?"

This question, which I have posed innumerable times and has even been printed on t-shirts, can be boiled down to this:

How like us need they be?

That question is at the heart of every decision we make regarding the way we treat each other. The question isn't one that gets answered very often by people who hurt and kill animals or by those who actions cause them to be hurt and killed.

I've asked that question a number of times in public debates with vivisectors. They respond in one of two ways. They say that the question is too hard for them to answer or they simply don't understand what is being asked. You'd think that Eric Sandgren, the university's spokesperson who I have debated at least twice, would have an answer since the question always comes up, but he doesn't, I've transcribed his latest sidestep below. Paul Kaufman, the head of the UW-Hospital's ophthalmology department (he experiments on monkeys' eyes) who I have debated twice, says that the question "is above his pay grade."

The other response is telling as well. When the question was put to Jon Levine, director of the university's primate center, and primate vivisector David Abbott during a public presentation, they appeared confused. They did not understand what was being asked. The concept of similarities between humans and monkeys having ethical implications was so alien to their world view that the could only look at each other in what appeared to be complete puzzlement.

Anyway, this was Eric Sandgren's response this time:

An outstanding question, and I think the answer is embedded somewhere in, the answer that each of us would get is embedded somewhere in our sense of what other animals are like in relationship to us. So, what is a monkey compared to a human? If you consider them to be equivalent, in relevant moral ways, then you would not let this happen to those animals. If you consider them to be different, in morally relevant ways, even if they're similar, if you consider them to be different then you could allow something like that to happen. I don't know that I want to, or even could, go into a real detailed description of what are the morally relevant differences, but I do know that there's a great deal of, there are many different opinions on that. I do not feel that monkeys are the same as humans in certain ways that would allow me to decide its okay in a case like this to do it.... I think it really is based on how we view other species.

[Be sure to listen to Jeffry Kahn's follow-up.]

This sidestepping non-response from Sandgren is circular and suggests as well that he really doesn't give a hoot about humans after all. He says he can't point to the morally relevant differences between humans and monkeys and so its okay to act as if they don't exist. He says that he knows that there are many different opinions about those difference but hasn't taken the time to consider them because he really doesn't care what other people think, apparently the morally relevant differences between him and those opposed to the experiments are so great that those other opinions need not be considered or even understood well enough to be able to refute.